O'Reilly and Adaptive Path Team Up for Ajax Summit

Earlier this week, O'Reilly Media and Adaptive Path teamed up for a summit on Ajax. For the unfamiliar, Ajax
stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. It's a fancy name for a web-based
application that uses JavaScript to display or process
XML/XHTML (rendered with appropriate CSS) from a server in real time
using XMLHttpRequest,
while often taking advantage of the browser's built-in XSLT engine.

Clearly it needs a fancy name. No part of Ajax is truly new; its
youngest piece is more than five years old, which for all practical purposes is about half the age of the Web itself. So why are Adaptive Path and
O'Reilly Media excited enough to have a summit? Certainly, its use in new cutting-edge web apps like Google Maps has something to do with it.

Ajax advocate Jesse James Garrett, founder of Adaptive
Path, says it's because Ajax offers a "philosophy of technology" that describes a new way of
creating applications on the Web. Ajax applications feel more like
desktop
applications, except with the real-time internet data part that you get from being
on a web page. "The wall between the desktop and the Web is coming
down."
He sees a relationship between Ajax and desktop applications similar to Apple's new Dashboard, which
uses tools more familiar to web developers than to the heavy lifters like
Cocoa programmers.

Indeed, this presents its own problems, perhaps most of all for end users. "Ajax breaks the interaction model of the Web." Garrett freely admits. It
faces the unique user interface problem of blending the expectations users
have of a website with the behavior of a desktop application. This is the consequence of giving the user desktop app powers within their
trusty browser.

But Is There a There There?

It's hard to tell on the face of it the real value of something that can be
boiled down to an approach or philosophy. With push
technology, not so much. With object-oriented programming, that's
history written.

Ajax has yet to write its history, but Flickr
is ready to bet on it. More than possibly any other company on the
Web, Ludicorp took Flash to places beyond where anyone thought it could
go, first with Game Neverending, and then farther with Flickr. The company
quietly announced at the Ajax Summit that it would be moving its
famous and well-loved photo sharing application from an intensely Flash
driven app to a more mixed platform. Flickr continues on its quest to
scale and refine its interface, from the Flash chat client it originally
launched with all the way to a new architecture that uses a combination
of
componentized Flash and Ajax. Eric Costello of Flickr demonstrated a
beta
of the new Ajax-flavored Flickr to a receptive audience. He sees a new
version of Flickr with Flash where it works most naturally, and Ajax
filling in the other features. For Flickr, this solves problems like easy
direct linking to images, without putting the onerous weight on the
back end that Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr, have seen with a
traditional
JavaScript interface.

O'Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest sees this marriage as good news; Flash/Ajax
integration will extend the reach of both. He sees Flash as struggling
to
fulfill the role it's been thrust into by web designers eager to use
features traditional web apps can't provide. "Flash works better as an
applet than Java, but we really don't like applets." Flickr's move will
make it the poster child for an Ajaxian app can do--if it goes according
to plan. A lot of people will be watching.

The Post-Bubble Perspective

Dornfest noted that the expectations of Ajax Summit are toned down
compared to similar events of the past, even if the promise is as real
as
ever. But he notes that the subdued tone and the "small pieces, loosely joined"
approach is one of veterans. "These are all people that have been burned
by skip intro and Java applets."

Even Garrett's optimism is tempered by a consideration of problems with
rich web applications. "The energy of the summit has been towards the
design problems Ajax faces breaking the interaction model of the Web ...
Ajax pulls the rug out from under users." Many summit attendees were
people actively dealing with the issue of developing new ways of
interacting, trying to build different expectations in their users.
Garrett is clear: whether particular metaphors of web interaction should be
adhered to or re-architected is unknown.

In other words, when you are building an Ajax app, right now there's no
way to know if you are about to do very bad design.

Garrett gives an example. Ajax apps can change the interface while hiding
the round trip to the server or omitting it altogether--without the
screen
going blank, how do you communicate to the user that some little
component
of the page has been changed?

Will Ajax adopt user guidelines from desktop apps, or choose a path of
bloody revolution? It remains to be seen, but Garrett believes it'll be
a
bit of both. This group didn't want the job of making those kinds of
determinations. Until a set of "best practices" emerges out of the
wider
community, no guidance will be coming from this particular list of
luminaries.

Not Coming to a Standards Body Near You

The summit saw little or no interest in any sort of Ajax standard.
Garrett
noted that "the consensus of the group was that there are too many
people
trying to solve too many problems in too many environments for there to
be
one standard." As such, he sees no universal Ajax toolkit forthcoming,
possibly ever. "The variety and needs of Ajax developers are too
diverse."

Instead the interest is in approaching browser developers directly on
issues of supporting desired features. Could that approach lead to
another
browser war?
Yes,
definitely, says Garrett, though neither he nor Dornfest believe it
could
be on the scale of the the late '90s. As Dornfest notes, "I don't know
that users would tolerate that again."

Away from the summit some complaints have arisen that Ajaxian apps are
being used in the enterprise bespoke market in such a way that locks down the
enterprise user to one version of IE, without the option of Opera,
Safari, Firefox, or any others. But the bespoke world seems to be a bit
like Vegas: what happens in bespoke software stays there, rarely
influencing the wider web.

Back on the wider web, Ajax is being driven by a desire for cross-browser
compatibility. While most of the applications on display at the summit were
small solutions to long nagging desires--some more cosmetic, some more
practical--a few of the attendees are working on interesting big apps
for
the widest possible audience. Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, has moved
on to Odeo to try and do for online
audio what Blogger did for personal web pages. Dustan Orchard showed how
an
Ajaxian approach is going to play a central role in what Odeo is
creating.
It's not available yet, but it's proceeding apace.

Participant Alex Russell summed up the summit's progress: "It hasn't so
much started new things as accelerated things that were already going
on."

Quinn Norton
is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Wired News, The UK Guardian, Make Magazine, Seed, and more.